Professional Reading ShelfDigital Preservation
Source: The New York TimesGrants Will Preserve Paperless Bits of History
"The Library of Congress is giving $15 million to eight institutions to preserve a range of electronic material, including Web sites relating to the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election, digital maps, sound recordings and decades' worth of social science data. The grants, to be announced today, are part of a $100 million multiyear program, established by Congress and administered by the library, aimed at archiving resources that are increasingly born digital -- that is, as a Web site or an electronic database."
See Also: Library Of Congress Announces Awards Of $15 Million To Begin Building A Network Of Partners For Digital PreservationSee Also: Direct to the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIPP) Web Site
--Digital Libraries
Source: ECDLPapers from the European Digital Library Conferences are Now Online
The conference took place from September 12-17th at the University of Bath. Here are just a couple of that papers that I plan to take a look at:
+ Libraries, digital libraries, and digital library research
+ Evaluation of an Information System in an Information Seeking Process
+ Fiction Electronic Books: a Usability Study
+ DSpace: a Year in the Life of an Open Source Digital Repository System
+ Sound Footings: Building a National Digital Library of Australian Music
+ Towards Topic Driven Access to Full Text Documents
--Union Catalogs
Source: Library World RecordsInternational Union Catalogs
"At present hundreds of huge union catalogs, library network catalogs and consortium catalogs (all based on the Z39.50 networking protocol) are ongoing projects around the world, and most of them, notably those in Europe and North America are up and running. Electronic union catalogs are very valuable not just for catalogers but library users, researchers, lecturers, teachers, booksellers etc.... As long as the union catalogs being submitted, are in electronic format such as CD-ROM access or Internet access, and provide access to at least 5 large libraries, all URls sent will be added to this web page. The libraries in the union catalog can be part of a town, city, county, region, consortium, state, province or country, etc."
--Archivists
Source: San Jose Mercury NewsMeet Anna Mancini, Company Archivist at Hewlett Packard
For your "cool job" file. From the article, "'I feel like I won the lottery,' Mancini says. 'It really is a once-in-a-career, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.'''
--Open Access
Source: College & Research Libraries (via E-LIS archive)Do Open Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact?
From the abstract, "hile many authors believe that their work has a greater research impact if it is freely available, studies to demonstrate that impact are few. This study looks at articles in four disciplines at varying stages of adoption of open access?philosophy, political science, electrical and electronic engineering and mathematics?to see if they have a greater impact, as measured by citations in the ISI Web of Science database, if their authors make them freely available on the Internet. The finding is that, across all four disciplines, freely available articles do have a greater research impact. Shedding light on this category of open access reveals that scholars in diverse disciplines are both adopting open access practices and being rewarded for it."Abstract ||| Direct to Full Text

In the third part of her analysis of FreePint's research into visibility, Robin Neidorf focuses on the findings around user behaviour. The results include a useful list of suggestions and ideas for how to connect directly with users on their own terms in ways that are meaningful to them. Barriers to influencing user behaviour are scrutinised and we asked respondents to rate the importance of different tools and activities in influencing user behaviour around information visibility.

FreePint interviews Martin White, specialist in enterprise search, intranet and information management strategy. The conversation covers the origins of computer-based search applications, his definition of enterprise search, and whether we should be investing in better search technology. We also asked about his book "Enterprise Search", first published around two years ago, to find out what will be new in the second edition coming out this year.

In the first section of his four-part article, Chris Porter introduces an in-depth review of the updated Manzama, an easy-to-use current awareness service for lawyers and other professional services users.